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Michele Brittany is an independent popular culture scholar and semi-professional photographer. She has edited James Bond and Popular Culture: Essays on the Influence of the Fictional Superspy (McFarland & Company), as well as the forthcoming book, Essays on Space Horror in Film, 1950s – 2000s. Follow Michele on Twitter, @mcbrittany2014.

Black Friday came early to the comic book community today. Many of us woke to the news that Rebellion Publishing's planned 2000 AD 48-page oversized issue for Free Comic Book Day (FCBD) 2016 was rejected. As the day wore on, the list grew to include ComixTribe and Alterna Comics. As the dust clears, it appears the decision to omit or force prior years' publishers out of the running for the 2016 lineup comes down to money.

In 1979, the word A L I E N was spelled out across the top of an ominous movie poster, conveying a sense of foreboding of something unknown. An eerie, yellow light seeped out of the egg-shaped space pod with the tagline: In space no one can hear you scream. Audiences were drawn along with the Nostromo crew as they explored the mysterious, abandoned ship on LV-426 and encountered a new and hostile alien species. It was one of the first movies to successfully combine science fiction and horror in an interstellar setting, spawning several inferior imitations in the 1980s while also inspiring standout films that furthered the genre, such as Event Horizon (1997), Pitch Black (2000), Sunshine (2007), and Europa Report (2013). While it may have seemed like space horror was a new genre after the release of Ridley Scott’s film, the genre has a rich history that took hold of movie audience-goers almost thirty years prior with the space horror films that could best be classified as invasion films. With a plethora of films, much has been written about science fiction, horror, or on individual films (mostly the Alien franchise), yet surprisingly, little analysis can be found on space horror as its own genre in cinema. It was with this gap that I pitched a book idea, was accepted, and now have a tentative title, Essays on Space Horror in Films, 1950s – 2000s. Now, it’s onto the next step, and here is where you come in.

This past weekend, Lovecraft enthusiasts descended upon the sleepy coastal town of San Pedro, California, for the annual H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival & Cthulhu Con, where for three days, the ratio of black t-shirt-clad visitors with R’lyehian sayings punctuated by tentacles increased exponentially.